The collection of poems Fughān-i Dihlī (The Lament for Delhi) was compiled in 1863 by Tafazzul Husain Kaukab. Its poems reference the turbulent events of 1857 and their aftermath in Delhi. The shahr-āshob genre of poetry, which began as a catalogue of ravishing male youths in Persian, took on a different meaning in later Urdu literature. Generally by the nineteenth century, a shahr-āshob was poem that detailed a city’s sociopolitical crisis. While scholars have often valued shahr-āshobs as mines of socio-historical information, the highly literary style of the Lament’s poems challenges this form of interpretation. Literary convention also renders its poems resistant to Pakistani and Indian nationalistic readings.